Crisis in the UK

The hiatus is over, though only for a fortnight because I’m not going to post over Christmas. I’m back, having failed to write a birthday post or anything else. It seems I don’t do that; I’m not the kind of blogger to post short stuff, or breezy chatty stuff. I have ideas for those kind of posts. I thought about reviewing the new Princess Superstar album, or writing about music critics’ inability to listen to the new Rihanna album without imagining every song is about Chris Brown, or even comics-related stuff like the end of Hellblazer and the departure of Karen Berger and the inevitable end of Vertigo, which is what those things together mean. But they rarely get written and they never get finished or posted. Whereas 1,500-word essays about comics I never liked that much – see Troubled Souls, yesterday – are apparently my thing.

For the next few months, then, I’ll be writing about the comics that appeared in Crisis and Revolver. Not everything, because some of – most of, being honest – what appeared in the comic was painfully right-on, embarrassingly unaccomplished, and forgettable in that way that only anthology comics can be, where you read every episode without ever caring or forming an opinion about any of them. But in almost every issue there was one story worth bothering with, from New Statesmen through to Bible John, and I’ll be writing about those. I’m also, as an experiment in masochism, reading the entirety of Third World War for the first time and I’ll write about that just so I’m not suffering alone.

My thanks to the Welsh Wizard, who scanned the comics I’m reading and using images from. I bought most of Crisis myself over the years in issues or in trades but my life’s made much easier by having high-quality digital copies.

Next week, the exploration of Garth Ennis’s early stuff continues with the delightful confection that was True Faith, just in time for our Saviour’s birthday.